By James Cullum
alexandrianews.org
Alexandrian Earl Lloyd, 82, the first African American to play basketball in the National basketball Association, at Charles Houston Recreation Center Friday night. Lloyd was welcomed back to Alexandria to discuss his autobiography, "Moonfixer". (Photo: James Cullum)
In 1950, Alexandrian Earl Lloyd became the first African American to play basketball in the National Basketball Association. The Parker Gray High School graduate later won a championship with the Syracuse Nationals, coached the Detroit Pistons, and, in 2003, was inducted in the NBA Hall of Fame. On Friday, Lloyd, 82, returned to Alexandria to discuss his recently released autobiography “Moonfixer”.
Lloyd, who lives in Tennessee with his family, left Alexandria 60 years ago to attend West Virginia State College. “It feels good to be home,” he told a packed house at Charles Houston Recreation Center. “It was a lot of fun putting the book together. But I could write a hell of a book from what I left out. I may have to have my Compaq ready to roll,” he said.
Lloyd fielded questions from the audience. One woman asked him the best moment in his career. “There’s only one answer. You got to get there. If you don’t get there, there’s no career. So, the highlight of any career is getting there,” he said. “At the NBA, I made about $5000 a year.”
In “Moonfixer”, Lloyd discusses his career and family life, both of which were affected by racial inequality. “I used to stand and look at George Washington High School – or as close as I could get, because they didn’t want you there – and then I’d think about how we had zero facilities at my high school, Parker-Gray: no gym, no baseball field, no stadium,” he wrote. “We played basketball in this tiny auditorium and we used to joke around that we got our school colors wrong. Ours were blue and white; we should have adopted the colors from George Washington so maybe we could get their old equipment when they threw it out, if the administrators there would have given it to us.”
Lloyd, a 6-foot-5 forward nicknamed “the big cat”, led West Virginia State to two Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association conference and tournament championships in 1948 and 1949. West Virginia State was one of two teams to finish the 1947-48 season undefeated. In the NBA, Lloyd played more than 560 games over nine seasons. He played for the Washington Capitols from 1950 to 1951, the Syracuse Nationals from 1952 to 1958 and the Detroit Pistons from 1958 to 1960. He coached the Pistons from 1972 to 1973 and was a scout for five seasons.
“I never knew my paternal grandparents,” Lloyd wrote. “My dad, Theodore Lloyd…was Alexandria born and bred, but he was a guy you could really respect because he got up early in the morning and went to the coal yard, and by the time he got back and ate it was about time to go to bed. Day after day he did that for us. You know, he had the dirtiest job, shoveling loads of coal on and off trucks, and he didn’t ever want me to come visit him down there… He didn’t get to see all of my games because we played in the afternoon and he was working and if he took off he’d lose his job.
“I think that might have been the hardest part, seeing what segregation did to someone like him. All these folks today, you hear them talking about how folks should pull themselves up from the bootstraps, and you know who they’re talking about. They’re talking about us. But what if the generation won’t let you wear boots When someone says, ‘I know how you feel,’ I always think: You can’t. You can’t until someone tells you that you can’t do this or that, or you’ve got to go to the back of the bus, and if you don’t do it something very bad is going to happen. If you don’t live that, you just don’t understand. That’s how my father lived, every day of his life. Segregation was degradation, but he got up and went to work.”
“My mother – she would always come to my games. She was a farm girl from a little town called Hamilton, Virginia. Her people were working farmers, and I guess the city was a little fast for her… Alexandria was not a teeming metropolis, but it as big enough compared to where my mother came from; Alexandria was close to DC and at least there were some things that we could do. We played softball in the morning and football in the afternoon, and the funny thing, looking back on it, was that basketball was third,” Lloyd wrote.